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  • Is It Me or Canonical Has Really Ruined Ubuntu This Time?

Good evening guys. I have been using Ubuntu for a considerable time on another PC went through 8.10 till 9.10 and was really happy with it. I mainly use Windows on my development laptop but today thought I would check Ubuntu 11.10 and dual boot it with Windows too.

Booted from USB and was happy with a shiny new UI that for the first impression looks promising and sweet. I have always loved Ubuntu and trusted it so I didn't really cared to really try everything as I thought it should be good just as the previous version and decided to just install it.

Everything went well and I starting using it installing the needed software, setting up the projects and here is where the frustration starts, Unity! The interface really sucks. Its simply un-usable it slows down the work, it is slugiish sometimes even unresponsive. Some small details are done in a really illogical way that I didn't grasp what added value they have in the "UX". The most frustrating thing is that un-movable Unity bar on the left.

All in all it may look good but if you're going to use it daily and get real work done the UI is really frustrating. They seem to be trying to make it like OSX, focusing too much on eye candy and some UI ideas. Well that's stupid, Linux was never meant to be that way.

For now I'll just stick with Windows 7 for daily work, at least everything works and I can get things done without frustration with a half baked UI.

Any thoughts about the issue? Suggestions about other distros for people who used to love Ubuntu and now hate it because of Unity and where it is going? Thanks.
I had ubuntu on one of my machine, you can log in using the classic session without unity.
same experience when i tried out unity, it really sucks...
am currently using mint ubuntu, without the unity crap.
you can try out xubuntu, they still have the one without unity.

if my memory serves me right, you can't use 'always on top' for an application in unity, which i found to be stupid. since previous version had it and its really useful.
I use Ubuntu 11.10 as the main OS at work (Web Dev) and at home
What's good in ubuntu, is that you can always install Gnome 3 or even gnome 2,
I do use unity launcher, along with other apps like Gnome do and gnome pie, Wish can replace the use of Unity Dash
scorz wroteI had ubuntu on one of my machine, you can log in using the classic session without unity.
This. It's the simplest way to keep using 11.10 without Unity.

On a side note, both canonical and gnome3 are doing a great job getting their UIs to match OSX and Windows, they do have a lot ahead of them. All in all, this is just a phase in the evolution of Linux UI. Give it some time, by the 4th Quarter of 2012 (presumably Ubuntu 12.10), things will shape up nicely.
I understand why people might want to distance themselves from Ubuntu and Unity. (It is also worth noting that Unity has attracted a lot of new users and foremost, a lot of new team members).

There are many reasons why Canonical pushed Unity:

1- You cannot beat Microsoft at their own game.

Ubuntu is officially set out to beat Microsoft in the PC desktop market share. (It's their forever unresolved bug #1). Gnome2 and KDE4, do a great work at providing a Windows desktop replacement for linux distributions (Gnome even has a program that emulates a Windows registry). However they will always be limited by the comparisons. Canonical is realizing that if it wants to play that game, it has to differentiate itself from the existing. Ironically, the Gnome3 release does fulfill this goal as well (and probably better than Unity). Is Canonical showing signs of Apple-like "control freak" philosophy?

Note that while they are distancing themselves from Windows(-XP-like) UI and the traditional desktop, they are distancing themselves from the core Unix philosophy as well. It's very similar to what Mac OS X did over 10 years ago, although it's the first time a Linux distribution does it. I guess that Unix cannot work on the desktop. The winning company will learn what to take from it and what to drop.

2- Not just a PC.

Canonical (just like any player in the field, namely Microsoft) knows that the PC is, if not dying, the most boring platform around. Nothing is really going to change there, you cannot move a long established leader. Mobiles, smartphones, tablets are booming, and no real leader has emerged yet.

Gnome and KDE don't work well outside the PC (after all, they're mainly desktop environments), whereas Unity does. Canonical has officially started two projects that give Unity a real purpose. The goal is to stretch a unified GUI on the desktop, the phone, the TV, ...


Another distro?

It seems to me that you're not fed up with Ubuntu as much as you are with Unity. Instead of looking for another distro, you could simply look for alternative desktop environments (remember, the desktop environment is just one part of the distro).


Here are the most famous Ubuntu spinoffs:

- Xubuntu: using the Xfce desktop environment. It provides a lightweight alternative to the big and fat traditional desktops.

- Kubuntu: based on KDE, a full-fledged desktop environment. I particularly recommend this desktop for those interested in developing desktop apps with Qt (Qt and KDE have a very strong historical relationship). Also note that earlier this month Canonical (regrettably) announced that they will drop the funding for the Kubuntu project after version 12.04.

- Lubuntu: based on LXDE, it's even more lightweight than Xfce. I remember running it with 128MB of memory. It's not a desktop environment as much as a simple window manager. If you're interested I could go into the details of the difference.

- Ubuntu Studio: A remastered Ubuntu spin-off, focusing on audio features. For the longest time it shipped a real-time kernel for better audio rendering, but now apparently the new standard kernel is pretty great and works well.

There are a few other spinoffs, but I don't think you'd be interested in them.

Also a final note, there are plenty of other distributions than Ubuntu. And generally speaking, all the mentionned desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE) as well as many others, are available on all distros.

For general-purpose computing, I suggest you take a look at Fuduntu, a Fedora clone with heavy focus on user experience.